


Damascus

by aeli_kindara



Series: Supernatural Codas [8]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Djinni & Genies, Episode: s13e16 Scoobynatural, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-30
Updated: 2018-03-30
Packaged: 2019-04-14 22:28:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14145960
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aeli_kindara/pseuds/aeli_kindara
Summary: Castiel finds the Tree of Life deep in the heart of Damascus, in a dusty garden behind a ruined wall.Its fruit comes at a price.





	Damascus

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [this tweet](https://twitter.com/casitstoobig/status/979529467747098624) for inspiration, Natalie for being the best fic bully a writer could ask for, and Cass, who [joined me down the rabbit hole](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14159565). <3

Castiel finds the Tree of Life deep in the heart of Damascus, in a dusty garden behind a ruined wall.

The people who lived here were wealthy, once. Now there’s a gaping hole in what used to be their roof, and the garden gate swings aimless on its hinges from a jagged, marble-tiled pillar that should be part of a wall. Castiel steps over the rubble left by the blast rather than risking the metal that might squeak.

At first glance, the garden looks empty. A cracked fountain at its center; a few trampled tomatoes in the dirt. A vegetable patch run rampant. By the back door, a flowerpot has tipped over and rolled, its contents still blooming. In the imprint where it stood, a spare key gleams, apparently undisturbed.

There’s power in the air, though. An ancient and seductive one, that taunts his senses with phantom scent and thrums through the roots of the world, and another — dancing around it to a shifting rhythm that gives way like sand to the step. Cas hasn’t felt it before. Not, at least, since Purgatory.

“Show yourself,” he says, and grips the hilt of his blade.

The garden shifts, and they do.

There are a dozen of them or more, standing in formation, and at their center — in place of the cracked fountain — a tree. It’s not as large as Castiel might have thought, but he recognizes it immediately as the source of that ancient power. It’s laden with fruit. A bee buzzes, indolent, from one to the next, and Castiel envies its easy ways.

At the foot of the tree stands a woman — if you could call her that. Her face is proud and alien, patterned in swirls of deep blue that shift dizzyingly under Castiel’s gaze, like a galaxy, or a pool in a stream. Her eyes are also blue, and too bright. Around her, her warriors are smaller, duller, more mortal reflections.

“You’re the Alpha Djinn,” says Castiel.

She seems to smile. “Yes.”

“I need the fruit from that tree.”

She spreads her arms. “Come get it, then.”

Castiel moves.

He kills the first djinn before it has time to react, ramming his blade up under its chin so it expires in a flare of blue. The next attempts to attack — it carries a spear, for all Castiel knows that its deadliest weapon is its touch — and he parries once, twice, dodges a thrust and ducks inside to smite it with one hard blow of his palm.

He turns, though, to find himself hemmed in — a spear on every side. His blade is too precious to throw; he wheels, and it chimes against the ring of spear points, a sound too lovely for his imminent doom. The djinn press closer.

There’s nothing else for it. Castiel spins the grip on his blade, drops to one knee, and slams the point into the ground.

The impact booms through the garden like a bomb, and the gate and its pillar fall. So do the djinn, though, some staggering and others losing their feet entirely, and Castiel can waste no time in mourning the destruction — he’s on the next foe in a heartbeat, and the next, and the next, dispatching one after another, until there are only three left, three on their feet and coming for him, determined, but he can beat them back, he has control, just another step of retreat and he’ll come up with a plan, another —

He trips backward over a block of rubble and hits his head as he goes down. His awareness swims; blood trickles from his lip. He blinks, and blinks again, and finds himself sprawled, stupefied, in the bloody dust.

A foot steps hard on his wrist, and his blade slip free of his nerveless fingers.

The Alpha Djinn looks down at him coolly. If she’s upset by the loss of her soldiers, it doesn’t show in her face.

Castiel can taste blood pooling in his mouth. “I thought the Tree would be guarded by my kind,” he says, around it.

She gives him a shrug that is not a shrug. “They abandoned it when it was stolen from once. After that, they thought its value was less than nothing. Degraded. We djinni knew better.”

It’s hard to focus through the pain. She must have some hold on his magic, Castiel realizes, to keep him from healing himself, and he feels a flash of brief and bottomless grief. He has failed to achieve this thing for Sam and Dean. 

“What do you want with it?” he manages, his breathing rough.

The queen of the djinni smiles. “Knowledge,” she purrs, and advances. “Good and evil. Truth and lies. Desire and fear, Castiel — would you like to see?”

She’s close — too close. “Don’t touch me,” Castiel says, and she laughs, and pulls away.

“Very well. But that is my price.” Her eyes are gleaming, now, and Castiel feels that looking into them might drown his very soul.

_ You don’t have a soul, _ says a part of him, stubborn; the same part that always reminds him of what he is to Dean and Sam, the same part that tried to turn on him in the Empty. He is what he is, and he’s made peace with that — neither human or angel enough to belong to any home.

“Ah,” breathes the djinn, “but isn’t that the question?”

If she’s going to kill him, she should just kill him. “Stop reading my mind.”

Her tattoos are practically dancing now — Castiel could swear he sees them shifting on her skin. “I shouldn’t be,” she tells him. “I shouldn’t be able to, not one of your kind. None of my magic should work on you, Castiel — and yet, somehow, it does.”

He stills. His head is pounding, and there’s a terrible tightness in his throat.

“That is my price,” she repeats. “Face your truth, and you leave here with as many fruits as you desire.”

Castiel narrows his eyes. There’s a catch, there has to be —

“You leave here  _ alive. _ ”

It’s better than any other option he can think of. He grits his teeth, and turns his eyes to the blue, anonymous sky.  _ Dean, _ he thinks,  _ I _ —

But he doesn’t know what to say. He never knows what to say. He looks at the djinn queen again. Amusement dances in the very air around her.

“Do it,” Castiel says.

\---

He is on an open plain.

There’s no one in sight, just the wind that beats the grasses, and the weeds and wildflowers that tangle among them. It’s late summer, he thinks, the sun molten metal and hard on his face, and the buzz of the grasshoppers is deafening.

His lip has stopped bleeding, and his head is clear. He’s wearing a suit, a clean one, but he’s left his trenchcoat behind.

He knows this place. He’s in Kansas. He revolves a slow circle, and then he sees the church.

It’s a small one, weather-beaten, the whitewash half-stripped from its exterior walls. The grass grows up to its windowsills now, heavy with late-summer seed. A single tall cottonwood grows beside it, incongruously green in the golden plain, and casts its shadow over the doorway.

It’s open.

Castiel’s never seen that before. He’s visited this place, many times, for a quiet spot to think without being disturbed. It isn’t far from the bunker — fifteen miles, maybe, out away from everything, just a fallen-down paddock a half mile away and a little cemetery of leaning headstones around back. He doesn’t know the last time it’s been used for its intended purpose. There is no road that leads there, just faint ruts, visible in certain seasons, that ghost their way through the grass.

He went inside, once, but the atmosphere was dusty and vacant, the benches askew and a scent of neglect on the air. It’s a single room, the white of the walls better preserved than it is outside, a simple wooden cross above the altar. Castiel found a wrinkled old hymnal in one of the pews, but the ink had run too badly to read the words.

There’s nothing there for him. But the door is open, and so he goes to it, pant cuffs brushing in the long, untrampled grass. He pauses at the threshold, but his vision is dappled with sun. He blinks to clear it as he steps inside.

It looks much like the last time he came here, except — alive.

The floors and pews are freshly cleaned and gleaming, a faint scent of pine and polish in the air. The sun streams in through windows free of cobwebs onto a room in perfect order — still simple, still secluded, but —  _ loved. _

At the altar, half turned toward Castiel, surprise written across his face, is Dean.

He’s alone in the church. He’s dressed in a suit, too, crisp white and depthless black, better fitted than any fed suit Castiel has ever seen him in; he opens his mouth as if to speak, but his eyes sweep Castiel, and he swallows. His eyes widen. His lips part. He stares.

Cas moves forward as if he’s in a dream.

He’s come to Dean like this just once before. Then, the walls were painted in useless sigils, bulbs bursting and lightning flashing as his power howled with the storm. Then, he strode through shotgun blasts and sparks that fell like stars, and felt his human vessel’s body shudder and renew itself with every wound it took. Then, he walked with righteous conviction and nothing he’d begin to call a self.

Now he has nothing at all, just his own body that yearns and his feet that draw him onward. He thinks that he should stumble, but he doesn’t, and it’s not a knife in Dean’s hand this time, it’s not anything Castiel can see, just an odd little lump in his pocket that his fingers flew to the moment he turned to see Castiel in the door.

This time, Dean comes to him.

He moves down the aisle as Castiel comes up it, and stops with him, facing each other, halfway between altar and door. He’s close, closer than Dean ever stands to him, and his eyes search Castiel’s face. He lifts a hand, as if to touch him, and lets it drop again.

“Cas,” he says. “Shit, I, uh —”

He thrusts his hands in his pockets, and the look on his face is open, worried, the faintest blush staining his cheeks. “Is this okay?”

Castiel looks around the room, turning without moving his feet. “I don’t understand,” he says.

Dean ducks his head. “Sam thought it should be a surprise. He thought you’d like — but, we don’t have to do it. I mean, Jody and Claire and the rest are coming down this afternoon, and I thought — but we can just take them out for ice cream or whatever. No pressure either way.”

“You did this for me,” says Castiel, slowly.

Dean colors more deeply. “Yeah.”

“Because,” tries Cas, “because —”

But he can’t quite get there, can’t believe it, not unless Dean says it for real.

Dean takes in a shuddering breath, and his hand catches Castiel’s, fingertips light, thumb resting at the pulse point on his wrist. “Because we’ve — been doing this for a while now, and I think, uh — been wanting to for even longer, I mean for a  _ long _ fucking time, Jesus Christ, Cas, and I — I’m sure,” he says, voice suddenly steady. “I don’t know how long we got. I mean I don’t know how long  _ I  _ got, I know this life is — how it is, we both know how it ends. But whatever I’m given — if you want it — it’s yours.”

“Dean,” says Castiel, feeling light-headed, ears roaring, “Dean, what’s in the box?”

Because that’s what Dean has in his other hand. Just a little box with a hinge at one side, and he draws it up between them so his fingers brush Castiel’s chest, fumbles it open, and they’re leaning so close their foreheads are nearly touching, and inside —

Inside are two gold rings.

Castiel reaches for them with trembling fingers. They spill into his palm with a gentle clink, shining innocuously in the sun. They are so small, so simple. It would be so easy.

“Cas,” says Dean, in a voice that’s barely more than a whisper. “Castiel. Will you marry me?”

The tether that’s been holding him back — holding him in doubt, in disbelief — gives way.

He picks up the ring — the smaller one, just by a hair, but he knows it’s his, knows it in his skin, in his blood. Carefully, so he won’t displace the other one, he spreads his fingers, and slips it on.

Dean’s eyes on him are soft, desperate, hopeful, elated, intent.

Castiel says, “I do.”

\---

It takes him a moment to readjust to the Syrian sun.

Where Dean was standing a moment before, the Alpha Djinn is now. Castiel is on his feet; he’s healed, no blood on his face. The djinn is as close as Dean was, her strange tattoos filling Castiel’s vision, and he steps back sharply, letting his hands fall.

She smiles and spreads her palms as if to indicate she means no harm. “You’ve won your prize.”

It’s not the time to argue.

The other surviving djinn look on as he harvests a sack full of fruit. It’s impossible to read anything in their impassive expressions, though they make him wary. Castiel works fast, snatching fruit after fruit from the tree — she said no limits, and he never knows what Sam and Dean might need.

He retreats quickly when he’s done, clutching the bag to his chest. He hesitates only to retrieve his angel blade from the ground. The djinn still watch without a word.

Castiel pauses at the garden wall. There are bodies everywhere. “I killed your children,” he says.

“I’ll make more.”

He closes his eyes. He says, more softly, “It wasn’t real.” Then, when she doesn’t answer: “A — a fantasy. Nothing that has a chance of coming true.”

When he looks again, her form seems to ripple in his vision. So do the other djinn. Even the Tree of Life is shimmering strangely, a mirage on a cloudless day. Castiel blinks, trying to make them all out.

_ A fruit from the Tree of Life, Castiel. Use it wisely. _

They’re gone. Only the cracked fountain and the wild vegetable patch remain.

Later, Castiel will find the gold ring, still where he put it: third finger, left hand. Later, he’ll slip it off again, make to throw it in the Mediterranean —  _ it means nothing, if anything you’re married to  _ her, _ it was just a hallucination, just a dream _ .

Later he’ll stop. Later, he’ll tuck it inside his least favorite socks and forget it at the bottom of his bag.

For now, he has the fruit of the Tree of Life. He’s done his job.

And he’s going home.

**Author's Note:**

> ETA: imogenbynight wrote another AWESOME take on Castiel's adventures among the djinn — [La'ahlam](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14159565). Go read that one too!


End file.
